1. Field
The present disclosure relates to network traffic management. More specifically, the present disclosure relates to a method and system for facilitating identification, isolation, and removal of bottlenecks in a network.
2. Related Art
The proliferation of the Internet and e-commerce continues to fuel revolutionary changes in the network industry. Today, a significant number of transactions, from real-time stock trades to retail sales, auction bids, and credit-card payments, are conducted online. Consequently, many enterprises rely on existing storage area networks (SANs), not only to perform conventional storage functions such as data backup, but also to carry out an increasing number of egalitarian network functions, such as building large server farms.
Historically, conventional network appliances (e.g., data-center servers, disk arrays, backup tape drives) mainly use an SAN network to transfer large blocks of data. Therefore, the switches provide only basic patch-panel-like functions. In the past decade, however, drastic advances occurred in almost all the network layers, ranging from physical transmission media, computer hardware and architecture to operating system (OS) and application software.
For example, a single-wavelength channel in an optical fiber can provide 10 Gbps of transmission capacity. With wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) technology, a single strand of fiber can provide 40, 80, or 160 Gbps aggregate capacity. Meanwhile, computer hardware is becoming progressively cheaper and faster. Expensive high-end servers can now be readily replaced by a farm of many smaller, cheaper, and equally fast computers. In addition, OS technologies, such as virtual servers and virtual storage, have unleashed the power of fast hardware and provide an unprecedentedly versatile computing environment.
As a result of these technological advances, a conventional SAN switch fabric faces a much more heterogeneous, versatile, and dynamic environment. The limited network and traffic management functions in such switches can hardly meet these demands. For instance, applications are dynamically provisioned on virtual servers and can be quickly moved from one virtual server to another as their workloads change over time. Virtual storage applications automatically move data from one storage tier to another and these movements are dictated by access patterns and data retention policies. This dynamic movement of application workloads and data can create unexpected bottlenecks, which in turn causes unpredictable congestion among different switches in the network.